Despite what you may have heard.
A lot of fuss was made this winter when some Tesla owners in Chicago experienced difficulty charging – but that wasn’t the experience for the majority of EV owners. In Colorado’s West Grand School District, electric school buses didn’t perform as well as their diesel counterparts. They performed better.
The town of Kremmling, Colorado is one of the coldest towns in the country, where high altitudes and northen winds combine to drive morning temperatures in the winter more than 30 degrees below zero. And it’s precisely in those super-cold temperatures that the school district’s electric school bus (which they’ve had since 2020) really shines.
“What we are seeing is that these buses are doing great in cold weather they still maintain a battery charge even when it’s cold,” said Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representative, Casey Becker.
It’s little wonder that the Kremmling school district is pleased with the performance of its electric bus. Even though it’s true that EV experience reduced range in extreme weather conditions, gas and diesel vehicles do, too. And, in the case of diesel, the vehicles might not start at all in Colorado’s bitter winter cold.
“Most of the winter it’s 30 to 35 below (zero),” offers West Grand County School District Director of Transportation, Bethany Aurinwhen. “When it’s up to 20 below that’s good day, and (the electric school bus) has performed extremely well.”
EV buses are China’s Sputnik
So now we need to inspire some competitiveness in our politicians to come from behind—OK, way behind. Way, way behind—& beat China, what gots 500,000 EV buses & builds a new larger-than-London-sized fleet of 10,000 every 6 weeks.
Typical EV puff piece — very sparse on information, such as how many electric school buses? A bit of Googling shows this town has had one electric school bus since 2020 and it just got a grant for two more. That’s a small sample size. The EPA is going to provide a grant for 49 buses for 9 Colorado school districts. If these buses are so good, why do they need an EPA grant?
https://www.9news.com/article/news/education/colorado-more-electric-school-buses/73-a828c164-a86f-4227-bc4a-c0fbe7c9e533